Today we took a coach on a tour of, well, a lot. It started with a stop at the wildlife park. I was skeptical, but it ended up being pretty awesome. We walked in and the first part was a wallaby petting zoo. I didn’t know what a wallaby was, but they’re like mini-kangaroos. They let us pet them and they sometimes hopped around. There were kangaroos for petting in the next pen, and we watched them hop around too. I didn’t realize there are more kangaroos in Australia than people--apparently they thrive, though cars and encroaching civilization have strained their habitats. This park was interesting because many of the animals were able to walk around with each other. Hanging out with the kangaroos were emus and egrets and all sorts of other exotic animals I’d heard of but could never identify. An emu is a giant bird. Those things didn’t do much, but they were fascinating just because they are so big. When we would approach one it would sort of growl or burp and grudgingly allow us to stand near it. It looked mad, though, so I didn’t try to pet the emu. We did pet the koalas, which were extremely cute but rather inactive. We saw wombats, kookaburras, penguins, bats, cassowaries (also giant birds), crocodiles, quokkas (like hedgehogs), dingoes (dogs), echidnas (like porcupines), and a host of spiders, snakes, lizards, and songbirds. The only Australian animal we didn’t see was the tasmanian devil, which is nocturnal and shy.
Then we went to the Blue Mountains, which are in Australia’s great dividing range, the only mountains on the continent, rising as high as 7,000 feet (though we were only at about 3,300). We had clear and pleasant weather the whole time. The town of Katoomba is a high-class, quaint mountain town and popular attraction due to the beautiful cliffs and the rock formations known as the three sisters. We stopped at a number of lookouts to get lots of great views of “Australia’s Grand Canyon.” It was not much compared to the actual Grand Canyon, but it was nothing to sneeze at. Great sandstone cliffs that had once been under the ocean have been weathered to quite a breathtaking panorama. There was a tourist area known as “Scenic World” which we thought was a cheesy name but otherwise very nice. It had two cablecars, one of which we took across a deep chasm. Then we took the steepest railroad in the world, which dropped us at a scary 53 degrees 450 feet down. Our tour guide commented that one tourist asked him if that 53 degrees was celsius or fahrenheit. He said, “Guess which country he was from...hint, it wasn’t Canada.” After the train, a walk through the temperate rain forest and another cablecar ride up, we were on our way.
We stopped at a cute candy store, another lookout for tea, the olympic park, and then we had a riverboat ride back to downtown Sydney. We briefly saw the Opera House from the water at nighttime. It was raining a bit, but still an amazing sight. Then we walked back to the hotel, got rained on a bit, ate some dinner and came back to the hotel. Tired!
Lastly, I’ll comment on some quirky culinary observations. Ketchup is indeed called tomato sauce. Bacon apparently means ham. Our restaurant last night served us but required us to order at the bar. Our restaurant tonight took our order but required us to go to the kitchen to pick up our food. I haven’t quite gotten Australia’s restaurant system figured out yet, and consequently, I have no idea what to tip for these partial serving experiences. And finally, we ate kangaroo stir fry for lunch. As our tour guide so aptly put it, we got to pet skippy in the morning and eat him in the afternoon. A weird experience, but I must admit skippy was tasty.
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